Welcome to our monthly gallery of best practices and tools from your Center for High School Success partner schools in Oregon and Washington. Below, your coaches have collected timely tools and featured practices from across our region to help support you, your team, and your 9th graders! Please reach out to your coach if you have any questions, feedback, on input.
DECEMBER 2024
As we head into the last week of school for 2024, our schools are teaching students to prioritize their missing & makeup work for the winter break, AND finalizing plans for your end of semester push in January. In our sequence of collaboratives in 23-24, we emphasized centering student belonging as the starting place when planning interventions. In our timely tools this month, we are sharing a great holiday book that could help reground your team in belonging as you launch anew in 2025! Our featured practice this month focuses on strategies for facilitating constructive discussions with your colleague about grading. Lastly, we wish you all the best as you had into a much-deserved break!
Looking ahead to our Winter Collaboratives (see calendar below for dates), we would LOVE to have your team present a session! Chat with your coach to learn more, and fill out the form using this link.

CHSS News: Washington State OSPI Update
WA OSPI GRANT NOTICE: Budget and Spending Reminder and New Payment Submission Requirement
This is a friendly reminder to continue submitting your monthly payment requests via-EGMS. We want to use all the funds available to help schools. If funds are not being spent throughout your grant cycle, they may be redistributed. The funding for this project will end on June 30, 2025, so it’s especially important that you report your spending regularly. To help us monitor funding, we ask that you submit monthly payment requests via-EGMS.
Your listed EGMS Fiscal Contact will have access to submit monthly payment requests.
If you need additional help or support with making budget amendment requests or submitting payment requests please swing by our EGMS Office Hours Tuesdays 10-11am and Thursdays 1-2pm.Thank you for spending down the funds! It’s very difficult to ask for more funding when grants go unspent. If you have questions, please feel free to email Kefi.Andersen@k12.wa.us or Jocelyn.Nunez@k12.wa.us and join us at EGMS Office Hours.
Calendar
Virtual Winter Collaborations: Registration links coming soon! Are you and your team interested in presenting at the CHSS Virtual Winter Collab? Please fill out the form using this link.
- WA Virtual Collaborative:
- Session A: February 25 and 26, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
- Session B: March 4 and 5, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
- Oregon Virtual Collaborative: Wednesday, February 18 and 20, 2025, 3:30pm – 5pm on Zoom
Regional Spring Collaborations: Registration links coming soon!
- Central WA #2 (Moses Lake): Thursday, April 24
- Oregon/Portland Area: Wednesday, April 23
- Puget Sound: Wednesday, April 23
- Central WA #1 (Yakima): Tuesday, May 6
- Northwest: Thursday, May 8
- Southwest: Thursday, May 8
Timely Tools

Holiday Book: Design for Belonging
This fresh and engaging book on Design for Belonging, from Stanford’s d.school, focuses on How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in your Communities. Special thanks to our key CHSS partner and champion Jeanne Willard, Executive Director with Everett Public Schools, for sharing!

Winter Break and Semester Success Plans
To elevate, prioritize, and support students finishing semester 1 strong and making the most of their holiday break, this flier and this supporting planning tool from Cascade HS in Everett are timely and powerful tools to modify and utilize at your school to support a strong finish to semester 1.

Tips and Scripts for Talking with your Colleagues
As schools engage in regular review of disaggregated data, puzzles and patterns emerge that prompt us to engage in conversations with our colleagues about student who are struggling, grading practices, late work approaches, and much more. This timely tool from Dr. Nicole Talbert, team lead at East Valley Spokane provides very helpful scripts, sentence starters, and strategies for making these conversations constructive and empathetic.
Featured Practice

Roadmap Driver: Implement Fair Grading Practices (With a special focus this month on implementation!)
Our most effective teams create intentional space to discuss and support high quality, standards-based, and culturally responsive instructional practices. Central to this is the implementation of fair grading practices, a topic that can be difficult to discuss, but one that has immense leverage over sharing and shifting the systematic adult practices that can support students for years to come. Below we highlight several practices that can support your team in getting started, going deeper, and sustaining these transformative interventions.
Best Practices for Implementing and Sustaining Hallway & Door Signs
First emerging in response to empathy interviews at one of our partner schools showing that many students with Fs were overwhelmed by widely varying and confusing teacher policies about late work and grading, the hallway/door sign intervention has taken off across our region. We have highlights examples of these in previous editions, but here we are focusing on examples illustrating implementation approaches that have resulted in sustained and successful rollout of this intervention
- Share your signs in a PowerPoint or Google Slide deck: many schools have created ONE deck with a slide for each teacher that has common formatting, and all answer the same 4 questions. Lead with an exemplar that illustrates your most effective teacher practices.
- Root your policy in research: Graham Kapowsin HS read Chapter 11 from Feldman’s book, Grading for Equity, to review the research around growth mindset, grading scales, redos and retakes. Then they had time to read through their door signs and make improvements to their policies.
- Maximize access + leverage strategic communications: Once completed, print, post, and distribute these door signs/posters to all stakeholders: public spaces, hallways, provide copies to all counselors, admin, interventionists, case managers, embed a QR code for digital access, and share with families through Parent Square, newsletters!
- Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress… Start with your 9GS team members to launch, then have these teachers share the impacts these door signs are having with their colleagues, departments, and build towards tier 1 implementation. This support benefits all students, but you don’t need to wait for consensus to start. Print them as they are finished, have students TAs put them up, and the word will spread as students start to notice!
- Review various signs from the perspective of a student or family member: Once you have some door signs completed, use team time to review these as a dataset: What do you notice? How are these aligned or not? How might we improve these to maximize student response and success?
This Self-Guided Fair Grading Toolkit was designed for schools to utilize as a free, multi-modal collection of podcasts, book summaries, videos, and other resources to explore to get the conversation started. Many teams will start small with this, such as by selecting one 10-minute clip from a podcast, all listening to it before the next meeting, and discussing collectively.
This 2023 article has been an eye-opener for schools who are focused on some of the outdated/fixed/moralistic beliefs about motivation (as, for example either intrinsic or extrinsic), in that this recent research highlights what is most motivating to students: the opportunity to redo their work!
Previous SNAPSHOTS
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT DECEMBERAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT NovemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT OctoberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT SeptemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT AugustAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT JuneAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT MayAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT AprilAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT MarchAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT January/FebruaryAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT DecemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share:
- Northwest CHSS Student Success SNAPSHOT NovemberAs we welcome our incoming 9th graders, we are excited to share some inspiring work from across our region, focusing on creating spaces of belonging for all students. To support your work this year, we have two important resources from OSPI to share: